BY Katie Kienbaum
North Carolina is one of the fastest growing states in the nation, but it lags behind its peers in one key metric - broadband.
While North Carolina struggles to connect its small towns and rural communities, most of North Dakota is already blanketed with high quality broadband networks. Thanks to the state's utility cooperatives, which have invested heavily in improving local connectivity, a family in rural North Dakota almost certainly has better Internet access than a household in any one of North Carolina's biggest cities.